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Rh peaceful means, or if need be by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.”

This was, in effect, an attempt to apply the principle of the Carlsbad Decrees to all the world; and, had the attempt succeeded, all Europe would have been turned into a confederation on the model of that of Germany; for a political alliance, charged with the safeguarding of the territorial settlement defined by treaty, would have been substituted a central diet of the great powers, armed with undefined authority; and the sovereign independence of the nations would have been at an end. To any such principle, and therefore to the protocol in which it was embodied, Great Britain offered an uncompromising opposition. In vain Metternich urged upon Castlereagh that the protocol was but the logical conclusion drawn from premises to which he was already committed; for, if the alliance was to be effective in maintaining peace, it must interfere wherever and whenever peace should be threatened, and therefore to crush internal revolutions which could not but have an external result. The logic was perfect; the proposition that on which every “project of peace” must eventually break. Castlereagh’s reply was, in brief, that Great Britain could never admit a principle which she would not in any circumstances allow to be applied in her own case.

The absence of the signatures of Great Britain and France from the Troppau protocol marked the first rift in the alliance, a rift that was soon to develop into a breach. For the

time, indeed, the crack was “papered over.” Castlereagh was prepared to leave Austria a free hand to deal with the risings in Naples and Piedmont, since she had treaty rights in the former case and her interests, as an Italian power, were threatened in both. Great Britain was even represented at the congress which reassembled at Laibach in January 1821, though Lord Stewart, the ambassador at Vienna, was not armed with full powers. Castlereagh had

approved of the invitation sent to the king of Naples to attend the congress, as implying “negotiation,” an improvement on the dictatorial attitude of the protocol. But everything in the conferences tended still further to shatter the unstable foundations of the alliance. Capo d’Istria, as though the debates of Aix-la-Chapelle had never been, raised once more the spectre of the “Universal Union” which Castlereagh believed he had laid for ever. Metternich, anxious to prove to the Italian Liberals that the tsar was no longer their friend, welcomed the demonstration, and Prussia followed obediently in Austria’s wake. “It is clear,” wrote Lord Stewart, “that a Triple Understanding has been created which binds the parties to carry forward their own views in spite of any difference of opinion which may exist between them and the two great constitutional governments.” (See and .)

But the narrower “Holy Alliance” of the three autocratic monarchies, as opposed to the two western constitutional monarchies, was not in fact destined to take shape till after the Paris revolution of 1830. Several factors

delayed the process, notably the revolt of the Greeks against the Ottoman rule, and the Spanish question, which latter formed the main subject of discussion at the congress of Verona in 1822. In the Eastern Question the interests of Austria and Great Britain were identical; both desired to maintain the integrity of Turkey; both saw that this integrity was in the greatest peril owing to the possible intervention of the Orthodox tsar in favour of his co-religionists in revolt; and both agreed that the best means of preventing such intervention was to bind the Russian emperor to the European concert by using his devotion to the principles of the Holy Alliance. At Verona, however, the Eastern question was entirely overshadowed

by that of Spain, and in this matter the views of Great Britain were diametrically opposed to those of the other powers of the alliance. She shared indeed with France and Austria the strenuous objection to the emperor Alexander’s proposal to march 150,000 Russians into Piedmont in order to deal with Jacobinism whether in France or Spain; but she protested equally strenuously against the counter-proposal of France, which was ultimately adopted, that a French army should march into Spain to liberate the king from his constitutional fetters in the name of Europe. George Canning, carrying on the tradition of Castlereagh, once more protested, through Wellington, as British plenipotentiary at the congress, against the whole principle of intervention; and when, in spite of the British protest, the other powers persisted, the breach of Great Britain with the continental alliance was proclaimed to all the world. When, on the 7th of April 1823, the French army under the duke of Angoulême crossed the Bidassoa, the great experiment of governing Europe through a central committee of the great powers was at an end. (See ; .)

Henceforth, though the treaties survived, and with them the principle of the concert on which they were based, “Europe” as a diplomatic conception tends to sink into the background and to be replaced by the old international

anarchy of the 18th century. To Canning this development seemed wholly welcome. He applied to the rivalry of states the Liberal principle of free competition as the sole condition of healthy growth. “Villèle is a minister of thirty years ago,” he wrote to Bagot on the 3rd of January 1823, “no revolutionary scoundrel: but constitutionally hating England, as Choiseul and Vergennes used to hate us, and so things are getting back to a wholesome state again. Every nation for itself, and God for us all.” But the essential difference between the rivalries of the 18th and 19th centuries was in the conception of the “nation.” To Canning, as to the diplomatists of the congress of Vienna, “nation” was synonymous with “state,” and national boundaries were those defined by the treaties,

which Canning was as bent on preserving as any of his reactionary contemporaries. The conception of the divine right of every nationality to readjust political frontiers to suit its own ideals was as foreign to him as to Metternich. Yet this principle of nationality, which was destined during the 19th century to wreck the political structure consecrated at Vienna, and to leave to the succeeding age a host of unsolved and insoluble problems, found in Canning its earliest champion in the higher councils of Europe. The recognition of the independence of the South American republics and of the belligerent rights of the Greek insurgents were both in the first instance motived by the particular interests of Great Britain; but they were none the less hailed as concessions to the principles of nationality, to which they gave an impetus which was destined to continue till the face of Europe had been transformed.

This in fact constitutes the main significance for Europe of the War of Greek Independence, which lasted from the first rising of the Greeks in the Morea in 1821 till the signature of the treaty of London on the 7th of May

1832 (see ; : History). Its actual outcome, so far as the political structure of Europe was concerned, was but to add an insignificant kingdom to the European states system. But its moral effect was immense. The sacrosanctity of the status quo had been violated, and violated with the active aid of three of the powers of the continental alliance: Russia, France and Great Britain. Metternich was right when he said that, in principle, there was no difference between the Greek insurgents and any other “rebels against legitimate authority,” and the Liberals of all Europe, forced into inactivity by the Austrian police system, hailed in the Greeks the champions of their own cause. Philhellenism, beyond its proper enthusiasm, served as a convenient veil for agitations that had little concern with Greece. Other forces making for political change were simultaneously at work. The peace secured by the concert of the powers had given free

play to the mechanical and industrial innovations that heralded the marvellous economic revolution of the coming age; wealth increased rapidly, and with it the influence and the ambition of the middle classes. The revolution of July 1830, which established the bourgeois monarchy in France, marked their first triumph. In